Virtualization, Rails and CDNs
A few weeks ago we (not me, but my company) started work on our GoComics igoogle gadget for the release of igoogle v2. We weren’t really sure how well it was going to go over, it didn’t take long before we were suddenly at 150,000 users and we were listed along with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal on the front of igoogle as the gadgets to get. Load generated by the gadget itself is extremely minimal as google has a excellent caching and proxy system that keeps the load off of us. We started to run some numbers on what we might see for users coming through from the gadget to browse the actual gocomics site. Those numbers started to looks a little scary and we (this is me now as the servers are my deal) got a bit concerned. Quick math lead us to figures that could easily double the traffic to our site and the amount of traffic we handle now isn’t trivial.
Our servers are virtualized using Xen and I had thought ahead, with some extra resources in place replicating a few more servers out didn’t take long. One of the things on our roadmap was to add a CDN in the near future, that got moved up a couple notches. In the original plan of the site we’d talked about separate asset and application servers, but as thing worked working well at launch we tabled that additional complication for later knowing we could add it in if need be. Later came upon us quickly, as often seems to be the case. I believe it took the Rails Dev less than a day to get the ability into the codebase for a distinct asset address, do testing and get things rolled out to a live environment. Going from decision of implementing the CDN to having the site running and using it took less than a working day. The speed at which we can do things in my company amazes me, I think of the extended projects I hear about other places and realize how special that is. Working with the talented crew that I do makes handling the back end so much easier and I can’t thank them enough.
Monday will be our big day and it looks like we gone from 150k to nearly 250k gadgeteers just starting into the weekend, I can’t guess as to how many we’ll have come the first “official” work day of the week. There’s a lot more tuning that can be done but it’s my view that we need to learn to run on high octane gas before we switch over to the specialized pieces in order to run rocket fuel.